Longford was right: prison is not the place for Archer

IF Jonathan Aitken is to be believed, the Earl of Longford's last words were, "Free Jeffrey Archer". The week before, in one of his last interventions as Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham also called for the liberation of the Ignoble Lord. In the short time since he was sent down, it seems that getting himself locked up is the most useful thing Archer has ever done.

In the same way that the imprisoned Nelson Mandela symbolised the struggle against apartheid, Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare is fast becoming a poster-child for reformers in the fight against the injustices of the British penal system. Admittedly, "Free Jeffrey Archer" doesn't have the ring of "Free Nelson Mandela". For one thing, it is easier to call for a man's freedom when you know he is an innocent political dissident than when he is guilty of perjury and hardly a selfless hero.

But then Longford was never one for easy causes. Neither Myra Hindley nor Archer was ever likely to prick the conscience of the nation. And that was his point. Most prisoners are guilty and a large number of them are not very appealing. Frank Longford campaigned for them because he was convinced that working for the future of prisoners meant working for the future of society. When he spoke up for the unspeakable, he spoke up for all. And it is in his honour that I would like to add my voice to the campaign to free the unspeakable Jeffrey Archer.

Whatever you thought about Mary Archer's shrill performance on the radio yesterday, Archer should be freed - not because he is innocent, but because prison is the wrong place for him. In its present state, prison is the wrong place for the majority of men, women and teenagers who find themselves there. The figures speak for themselves. The prison population in England and Wales has increased by 60 per cent in the past seven years to stand at a record 67,000. We jail more people than any other European country except Turkey. By 2008, the total will reach 84,000.

More than half all adult prisoners and more than 80 per cent of young offenders will be reconvicted of an offence within two years of release. The high rate of re-offending can be directly linked to the shocking conditions in some of our prisons. In a briefing for last month's Lords debate, a Howard League for Penal Reform representative said that a sixth of all prisoners are held two to a cell, in rooms designed for one person. These small chambers contain both toilets and dinner tables.

As the board of visitors of Norwich Prison put it in a recent letter to Douglas Hurd: "Overcrowding inmates who are forced to live in a minute space and eat in a lavatory is not acceptable. We see no good reason why inmates should be so treated. If the conditions are not acceptable, rehabilitation will be affected and the costs of return to prison because of re-offending will be greater than the savings made." Some inner-city prisons keep people locked in their cells for 23 hours a day. Inadequate staffing means that the amount of time that inmates spend engaged in "purposeful activity" is woefully inadequate.

The quickest-growing groups of prisoners are women and young persons - the numbers have doubled in the past seven years. Although these groups are particularly vulnerable - often suffering from mental health and drug problems - they seem to come last in the priorities of humane and relevant treatment. Holloway Prison (women) and Feltham (young offenders) were the two prisons that received the most lacerating criticisms from the chief inspector. He described the conditions at Feltham as amounting to "institutionalised child abuse".

This treatment of prisoners takes place at the most enormous cost. It costs £72,000 to build a new prison place and £27,000 a year to maintain it. Keeping Jeffrey Archer in prison is costing us £7,000 a year more than it would to send him to Eton.

Prison does not work. "If prison worked," Sir David has said, "there would be more education for every prisoner. If prison worked, we would be shutting prisons, not opening more. If prisons worked, judges would not be seeing the same faces in the docks over and over again. If prison worked, fewer mothers would be in prison; therefore fewer children would be in care. If prison worked, we would be saving billions of pounds with fewer prisons, fewer care homes and fewer court cases."

The prison system is in a shocking state. It is even more shocking when policy makers ignore a stream of reports and recommendations. For years, experts have been advising that an emphasis on reparation and restorative justice is the best way forward for those on short custodial sentences. They have shown that, in many cases, community sentencing is more effective than, and one tenth as costly as, incarceration. They have called for the establishment of "community prisons", with high staffing levels, intensive regimes and close contact between prisoners and their families.

The last two home secretaries responded by slamming more people than ever in prisons and drastically cutting the money spent on them. David Blunkett seems to have a more responsible attitude - he has at least admitted that the present system is faulty. But so far the only firm commitment he has made is to harsher sentences for persistent offenders.

Why is it that governments are so cowardly? Partly because they are subservient to the tabloids - which all assume that the public is irretrievably penal-minded. Newspaper editors and home secretaries have not grasped that it is not in the public interest to keep shoving people into prison. The true interest of the public is in the reform of criminals, not the creation of them. Lord Longford understood this, and it was to this end that he called for Archer's release.

Perhaps he also knew that he would be serving the public interest by setting Archer free before his time inside could result in something truly regrettable - as Mary Archer said yesterday, prison is a terrific place for writing books.